'Britain's Great Gatsby' Stephen FryEvelyn Waugh's acidly funny and formally daring satire, Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability that lurks beneath the glittering surface of the high life.In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade - whether promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. In a quest for treasure, a favourite party occupation, a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the fulfilment of unconscious desires.If you enjoyed Vile Bodies, you might like Waugh's A Handful of Dust, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'The high point of the experimental, original Waugh'Malcolm Bradbury, Sunday Times'This brilliantly funny, anxious and resonant novel ... the difficult edgy guide to the turn of the decade'Richard Jacobs

In 1945, just as the war was ending,'the teenager' arrived. This is the story of how we got to that moment-the century and a half of ferment, folly, and angst that created a separate Teen Age in Europe and America. Jon Savage goes back to 1875 (when the first bestselling teenage memoir appeared and the first teenage mass murderer was tried), and takes us all the way through to the death of Anne Frank. In between we roam London, New York, Paris and Berlin with hooligans, Apaches, and other gangs; explore free love with Rupert Brooke and eternal youth with Peter Pan; see commerce and advertising grab a new market and watch the relentless militarisation of youth, from the Boy Scouts to the Hitler Youth. Savage describes all ranks and kinds of people, from flappers and zootsuiters to the Bright Young Things, the unemployed and the Lost Generation. The book rings with music, from Ragtime to Swing, and the stories come fast and furious, comic, poignant, painfully moving. Following the endless efforts of adults to contain, channel and control youth and the ideals and rebellion of young people determined to make their own way, Teenage covers two world wars-one which obliterated the dreams of a romantic generation; the other which unleashed the power of America - and the teenager - on the world.This brilliant mix of wide-ranging research, fast narrative and penetrating analysis, stands entirely alone. It will startle, disturb and amaze, opening readers' eyes to a history never described before.

.0000000000Connie's unhappy marriage to Clifford Chatterley is one scarred by mutual frustration and alienation. Crippled from wartime action, Clifford is confined to a wheelchair, while Connie's solitary, sterile existence is contained within the narrow parameters of the Chatterley ancestral home, Wragby. She seizes her chance at happiness and freedom when she embarks on a passionate affair with the estate's gamekeeper, Mellors, discovering a world of sexual opportunity and pleasure she'd thought lost to her. The explosive passion of Connie and Mellors' relationship - and the searing candour with which it is described - marked a watershed in twentieth century fiction, garnering Lady Chatterley's Lover a wide and enduring readership and lasting notoriety. The text is taken from the privately published Author's Unabridged Popular Edition of 1930, the last to be supervised in the author's lifetime. It also includes Lawrence's My Skirmish with Jolly Roger, his witty essay describing the pirating of this most notorious novel which was specially written as an Introduction to this edition.With an Afterword by Anna South.

Only the scathing wit and searching intelligence of Jessica Mitford could turn an exposé of the American funeral industry into a book that is at once deadly serious and side-splittingly funny. When first published in 1963, this landmark of investigative journalism became a runaway bestseller and resulted in legislation to protect grieving families from the unscrupulous sales practices of those in "the dismal trade."Just before her death in 1996, Mitford thoroughly revised and updated her classic study. The American Way of Death Revisited confronts new trends, including the success of the profession's lobbyists in Washington, inflated cremation costs, the telemarketing of pay-in-advance graves, and the effects of monopolies in a death-care industry now dominated by multinational corporations. With its hard-nosed consumer activism and a satiric vision out of Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One, The American Way of Death Revisited will not fail to inform, delight, and disturb. "Brilliant--hilarious. . . . A must-read for anyone planning to throw a funeral in their lifetime."--New York Post"Witty and penetrating--it speaks the truth."--The Washington Post

From ancient Egypt through the nineteenth century, Sexual Personae explores the provocative connections between art and pagan ritual; between Emily Dickinson and the Marquis de Sade; between Lord Byron and Elvis Presley. It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.

Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Après moi, le déluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule. Nor was it clear that constitutional government could keep this possibility at bay. Constitutional government might make public credit more secure, but public credit might undermine constitutional government itself. Before the Deluge examines how this predicament gave rise to a widespread eighteenth-century interest in figuring out how to establish and maintain representative governments able to realize the promise of public credit while avoiding its peril. By doing so, the book throws new light on a neglected aspect of modern political thought and on the French Revolution.

Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music is a unique oral history. Here are the recollections of many of the giants of soul—Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Mary Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Wilson Pickett. These and other interviews, many of them exclusive, add up to a brilliant anecdotal portrait of the music and the life. Gerri Hirshey is the author of We Gotta Get Out of this Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock; she has also written for Rolling Stone and the New York Times.

Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime--a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women.The Bird Artist is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.